At present, widely provided to organizations such as corporations is a knowledge management system having an object to improve achievements of an organization by allowing the whole organization to share and utilize its information and knowledge that are dispersed across individuals and departments. Such a knowledge management system is disclosed in, for example, MATSUI KUNIO, TANAKA HOZUMI, “Knowledge Management: The Latest Developments of Knowledge Management”, Joho Shori, Information Processing Society of Japan, April 2006, Vol. 47, No. 4, p. 421-424 (Non-patent Document 1).
Further, in the world of the Internet, there exist sites dedicated to question/response, on which one person wishing to obtain information posts a question or a thing about which he/she wishes to know while another person makes a reply thereto (that is, information provision), and the sites are attracting a large number of participants.
For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application (JP-A) No. 2004-185341 (Patent Document 1) discloses an information provision service system including: reply candidate retrieval means for excerpting a keyword from a sentence of each question written to a question server and comparing relevances to matters regarding the past schedules of the respective users registered in schedule management means to thereby assign a highly-relevant user as a reply candidate with respect to the question; and contacting means for contacting the assigned user to make a request for a reply to the question.
Further, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application (JP-A) No. 2007-34965 (Patent Document 2) discloses a technology provided with a knowledge information database that indicates a relationship between an attribute of a knowledge worker and a document created by the knowledge worker, in which document creating means registers a document in the knowledge information database in association with the knowledge worker if the document is created by the knowledge worker, and in which knowledge exchanging means acquires information on the document and the knowledge worker from the knowledge information database and registers the document in a place for knowledge exchanges (including a mailing list, an electronic bulletin board, and a community site that exist on a network) which is accessible to a plurality of knowledge workers.
Further, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application (JP-A) No. 2001-273310 (Patent Document 3) discloses a various inquiry/reply service system provided with an automatic response unit for searching a response example database and a knowledgebase with regard to a question received through a Web page or electronic mail sent from a client or from inside a company via a communication line, and automatically returning a reply of a result thereof.